MARKETING ADVICE FOR ADVISORS: 5 Tips for Building Your Expertise

A lot of advisors today are still relying solely on traditional methods of business development — like asking clients for referrals, cold emailing and networking.

The problem is not the method, but the call to action used with the method. Often times you’re asking your network and your clients to invite their friends to book a consultation with you. It’s no wonder why the sales cycle takes so long and yields a disappointingly low response rate.

Whether you’re an attorney, CPA, coach, consultant, financial advisor, attorney or fitness expert there is an overwhelming number of other advisors in your category competing for your prospect’s attention.

So, how does one stand out among so much competition?

The key is to focus on building your reputation as the clear go to expert in your field.

When you build your expertise:

Prospects are immediately pre sold on you before they even speak to you.

Prospects are calling you instead of you needing to go prospecting for clients.

You can also command higher fees when you get known as the high level expert.

Those are 3 great reasons to building your expertise isn’t it?

Yet, this marketing advice has been missed by so many advisors who end up spinning their wheels simply networking at coffees and lunches or buying more ad space. Instead of thinking about your marketing plan as “advertising” as an advisor you want to think about your overall marketing plan more like “educating.”

Keep in mind that the job of advertising is to to simply bring attention and awareness to who you are. It’s pretty difficult to build your expertise inside an half page ad space, but you can do this easily with the unlimited free space you have at your disposal with a blog.

Educating your target market is not only free, but it also serves a key role to attracting more traffic to your website.

Advisors who are stingy (or paranoid) about sharing your knowledge are the ones who end up being regarded as a commodity.

Here are 5 ways to implement this marketing advice, so you can leverage your advice to quickly attract new clients with ease.

1. Start blogging.

A blog is an article that is written in your voice as if you are having a personal conversation with your prospect one on one. You publish your blog on your main business website under it’s own tab labeled “blog”.

Blogging is an opportunity for you to leverage your time while reaching a much larger audience. Here are four great reasons you should start blogging:

Blogging builds equity into your marketing assets — like owning a home versus paying rent each month. When you publish your blog article, since it lives on the internet forever (unless you unpublish it) your message continues to reach new people month after month … year after year.

Blogging is also one of the easiest and fastest ways to get found on the internet by those very people who are looking for an expert like you (which is an SEO marketing advice tip!)

Blogging is also a great way to fuel your other business development tactics. If you’re using a free consultation or an “apply now” lead generation approach, you’ll see higher response rates if you first drive advertising, networking, social media updates to specific blog posts. This is an important bridge step that introduces a cold audience to you and warms them up. You’ll see a much higher response rate to your free consult or apply now invitation once you give them time to know-like-trust you through your valuable blog posts.

Blogging is an easy way to showcase your thought leadership and build your reputation as the go to expert in your field. You can even republish your blog on your LinkedIn profile as long form articles where you’ll receive even greater visibility and reach than from just your website traffic alone.

So, now that you’ve decided you will commit to blogging, what should you blog about?

2. Brainstorm a blog editorial calendar.

It can be pretty daunting to stare at a blank paper and expect to whip out a great blog article every week. So, break up your blogging process in tiny bite size pieces. First, just brainstorm a list of ideas on topics and titles you could blog about.

What are the top 10 most frequently asked questions you hear from your prospects and clients?

What are the top 10 myths your target market believes about your topic that you can debunk?

What are 10 pieces of bad advice you see others giving in your industry?

What are 10 questions your prospects SHOULD be asking you?

What are 10 things prospects should be looking for when choosing the right (fill in the blank)?

See how quickly you can come up with your first 50 title ideas with just these thought joggers alone?

Here are 3 different examples:

If you are a CPA you could answer questions like:

What’s the latest tax advice for maximizing cash flow and profits for small business?

How to do a profit and loss statement for small business

What is a general ledger?

Pros and cons of sole proprietorship, LLC or sub S corporation

If you are a physical therapist you could answer questions like:

How long should you rest from a sprained ankle?

My son thinks he can tape his injured ankle and still play in the game. Is that a bad idea?

What are the best exercises to strengthen weak ankles?

This marketing advice is not just for advisors alone. It also works for all business owners. Let’s say you own a residential / commercial painting business you could answer questions like:

What’s the difference between latex paint and oil based paint?

What is the best type of paint to use for exterior house painting?

What should you do when you see bubbles on your exterior siding?

Ok, so imagine your website being full of answers and advice you give on 20 of these types of questions. I’m sure you can see how that would quickly elevate your expertise in the minds of your prospects.

By simply educating the public (which is what you do anyway when you speak to potential clients one on one) you are marketing yourself while being seen as the go-to expert in your field.

Building your expertise does take work. It won’t happen is just 5 minutes a day. However, it also does not require 5 hours a day either. After all, most of your work-week should understandably be spent in serving your clients and scaling your business!

3. Re-Purpose your blog for 5X the ROI.

Here is a great way to re-purpose one activity into multiple tactics, so you can reach more prospects through multiple channels. The gem in this marketing advice is by re-purposing your written content you are scaling your reach into audiences that the written word alone would not reach.

Speak your blogs on video. While some prospects are readers and will find your blogs while surfing the internet, other prospects are visual and will find your content while surfing YouTube. Videos are also even more effective at building relationships than the written word alone because you engage more of their senses.

Plus, your personality comes through even greater on video when you speak. Building videos does not have to be expensive. While it’s good to hire a professional videographer for some of your video marketing, you can also create lots of great video blogs right from your smartphone or webcam.

If you don’t like getting in front of a camera or you just don’t have time to shoot a video here is an example of how I converted a blog post into a videowhere I’m mostly sharing my slides. You can also see an example of what the audio version looks like too on this same page:

Speak your blogs on audio. A third segment of your prospects are neither readers nor have the patience to sit in front of a computer to watch videos. For people who are on the go and like to multi task my marketing advice is to reach these folks through downloadable audio mp3’s where they can listen to your advice and get educated while they are driving, walking or doing other activities.

Republish your blogs on LinkedIn as long form articles. With this tip I mentioned earlier you want to be sure you publish it first as a blog on your website, then publish it again on LinkedIn. It’s a good idea to include a note at the end of the LinkedIn version that it was originally published on your specific blog URL.

Publish your blog as a SlideShare presentation. There is a 5th segment of your prospects who like getting a condensed version of your content in a Powerpoint slide deck format. You can hire inexpensive freelancers on sites like Fiverr to convert your blog into beautifully designed Powerpoint slides. Plus, since LinkedIn owns SlideShare it’s another great way to multiply your find-ability on LinkedIn.

4. Promote, Promote, Promote Your Blog!

Share your blogs, videos and audios on social media consistently throughout the year. Once you publish your blog people searching your topic will be able to find your article online (more so when you learn how to optimize your blogs for the right keywords), but you can drive 10X more traffic to your blog post when you promote and re-promote your content over and over throughout the year.

Social media is a great channel to share the links of each blog, video and audio on sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus. Once users see the value you bring, you can get them to follow you and also share your content with others.

Every time you share a blog post or other types of updates on your social media your post appears in your network’s feed which is like having your ad appear (for free!) in the daily newspaper that gets delivered to everyone’s front door. You are reaching targeted people in your network as direct mail post cards would.

Except, they’ll want to read your post because it’s not an advertisement in the style of a commercial. They read your posts because you shared valuable information that educated them.

5. Convert blog readers into email subscribers.

While a some of your blog readers may contact you right away, studies show that 67% of people researching the internet are not yet actively ready to buy. But if they are reading your blog at all you want to consider them as a “warm audience”.

A great way to turn your warm audience into warm leads is to offer something of value in exchange for their email address. That way, you have the benefit of communicating with them directly to their inbox, so when they are actively looking to buy you will be top of mind since they have already been receiving valuable emails from you on a regular basis.

In the context of a blog, this is often referred to as a content upgrade. Explaining what this is and how to do it is beyond the scope of this blog post. So, I put together a free 3-part video course where you can use this key strategy to generate a steady flow of hot leads for your business.

BONUS BENEFIT! You don’t even need to have a blog yet to implement this strategy I share inside the video course. You can use this to start generating hot leads right away as well as using it is as a blog content upgrade.

When you enter your name and email I’ll send you the video series straight to your inbox.

If you enjoyed the marketing advice in this post please do share with other advisors and experts you know. I’d also like to invite you to …

PLEASE COMMENT – what is the ONE biggest paradigm shift you have now about marketing your business from reading this blog? Share your comments and questions below.

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About Yoon Cannon

Yoon Cannon helps entrepreneurs overcome your biggest obstacles, so you can create a thriving business and life you love! Yoon has started and sold three other businesses and has been featured in: CNN Money, Inc., Entrepreneur, Fortune and The Wall Street Journal.
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